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Domain: sisd.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to sisd.com.

Stories · 1

  1. Open Source Billing Solutions?

    Ask · Money · · posted by timothy · from the surely-they-can't-be-alone! dept. · 156 comments
    antis0c writes: "I am in the process of starting up an ISP, and I've been trying to find some really good Open Source Billing Software. I've looked around quite a bit, and the only truly Open Source solution I found was Freeside. It seems to offer a lot of what I need; Real-time credit card processing, MySQL database backend, Radius and Apache support, and all the general account management things you expect, but the user interface really leaves much to be desired. It doesn't feel very secure at all as it uses a lot of suid scripts and suEXEC in Apache and it also requires a lot of 3rd party Perl Modules (21 to be exact) which getting them all to work properly in conjunction with Freeside seems like a harder task than jumping through hoops of fire. My question is, what kinds of Billing Software have you guys used, and [what are] your good/bad experiences with it?"

    Billing software and a lot of other infrastructural nitty-gritty is probably keeping a lot of businesses from switching to the joys of Open Source software for their backend. And if it requires 21 3rd-party modules to make Freeside work well, wouldn't some bright soul like to sell the work of neatly packaging those modules back to Freeside, so all will benefit from them? It would certainly make a nice diagram in the to-be-written textbook The Economics of Open Source Software.